Author: VGGalore

very best hot cakes the world has ever seen. In a rather enticing statement, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has hinted at the possibility that the console may be able to take things one step further, potentially breaking the typical trend for console life cycles that we’ve seen for a number of years.

Dating all the way back to the release of the SNES in 1990, Nintendo’s home systems have always released in five or six year increments; the Nintendo 64 arrived in 1996, the GameCube came five years later in 2001, the Wii was another five years down the road in 2006, with the Wii U launching six years later in November 2012. Of course, the Switch released last year in March 2017, just shy of the usual five year mark since its predecessor, but this was only caused due to the Wii U’s disappointing sales. A very similar pattern can be found for the home consoles of Sony and Microsoft, too.

Miyamoto-san’s statement came from a recent investor Q&A. When asked where he would place the Switch in terms of its life cycle, he responded with the following:

“When you think about what can be done with the Nintendo Switch as a device that can be taken on the go and that every person has in their hands to play, you realise it has many features not available on any other hardware to date,” Miyamoto said. “Nintendo also has a system in place whereby the software developers focus on these hardware features in their development efforts for the continuation of the Nintendo Switch business. Up until now, the hardware lifecycle has trended at around five or six years, but it would be very interesting if we could prolong that life cycle, and I think you should be looking forward to that.”

There is no doubt that we are currently witnessing a very exciting time for the industry as a whole; the Switch is breaking records left, right, and centre, and this new surge of popularity will only spur on Nintendo’s competitors, too, hopefully resulting in bigger and bolder releases across the board.

How long do you think we’ll be seeing the Switch on game store shelves? Make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Ryan’s that annoying kind of guy in multiplayer games – you know the one, the kind of person that throws a temper tantrum if he can’t be Yoshi in Mario Kart or gets stuck with the controller with the dodgy button. Yeah, that kind.

Kingdom Come Deliverance joins the Xbox One X Enhanced games list this week, alongside recent additions Monster Hunter World, Overwatch and Forza Horizon 3. Dynasty Warriors 9, which released last week, also get an upgrade.

What ‘Enhanced’ means varies wildly on from game to game, although usually you’re looking at 4K output and HDR as a bare minimum. Then there are the extras, which could include graphical upgrades like better lighting and shadows, improved textures, increased detail at distance and more.

In addition you can get some options to vary things depending on whether you want resolution, or frame rate (you can rarely have both). So games like The Witcher 3 or Monster Hunter World let you chose between the two.

There’s well over 100 Enhanced titles in the list as we speak and it’s going up all the time, with nearly everything being released now having some sort of tweak to use the Xbox One X’s full power.

If you’re not sure what all those terms like 4K, HDR and more actually mean then here’s a quick breakdown before we see all the games.

4K resolution on home screens is actually 3840 X 2160 pixels.

HDR means High Dynamic Range and basically improves the colour range of an image. So blacks are blacker, tones stronger and so on.

FPS means frames per second. Most games hit 30 now, with 60 the current standard to aim for. It’s worth noting that when frame rates are noticed and discussed it’s usually because they’re changing or unstable, not necessarily because they’re low.

Checkerboard rendering is a way of essentially splitting a screen image into a tiny grid and only rendering every other square. A filter then reconstructs the missing parts to create the target resolution, using less processing power as a result. It’s practically indistinguishable to the human eye but technically not ‘true’ 4K.

Dynamic scaling/resolution means a game varies the resolution it renders at, usually depending on the processing power needed at any given moment. This doesn’t always affect the output resolution as things can be scaled up. So, roughly speaking, a ‘4K’ game might render a 2K image when things are quiet, and upscale to 4K, but drop to a lower rendered resolution (still upscaled to 4K) when a lot is happening (explosions, loads of enemies etc)

You can find a more in-depth explanation of what things like 4K and HDR actually mean here. But in the meantime, what are you waiting for – here’s every Xbox One X enhanced game and what features it includes (where we actually know, that is).

Square Enix have been fairly strong supporters of the Nintendo Switch thus far and they are looking to reinforce that support by bringing more high quality titles to the system. Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda recently spoke to UK publication EDGE and said he was pleased with how the various games they’ve produced have fared on…

Eurogamer has updated its recent Metroid Prime 4 post and says that the lead developers for the upcoming Metroid Prime 4 on the Nintendo Switch will be Bandai Namco Japan. Bandai Namco Singapore is now busy developing another Nintendo Switch game, which according to the earlier leak could be a new entry in the Ridge…

Update: The link has now been removed. South Park fans might want to get ready to rejoice as Amazon Mexico has put up a listing for South Park: Fractured But Whole for the Nintendo Switch. The game has been rumoured to be coming to Nintendo’s latest platform for quite some time. Ubisoft have always been…

Pokemon on the Nintendo Switch could be coming to the platform sooner than we anticipated. The initial European translations for the next big Pokemon title are set to be completed between April and June 2018. They will then undergo localisation editing. Editors for the translation effort are being hired on a minimum six month contract.…

Update: Apparently Marcus isn’t correct according to Liam Robertson. We reported on a rumour not long ago that Mario Party 11 could be coming to Nintendo Switch next year. Now, from the same source (Marcus Sellars on Twitter), comes a tonne of information relating to the supposed title. We get a potential insight into some…